Hi everyone!

My name is Emily Stuhldreher, here’s (almost) everything you need to know about me:

• I am starting my senior year at Ohio State University this fall (graduation Spring 2019).
• I study Social Enterprise, through a Personalized Study Program at Ohio State.
• I’m passionate about efficient, effective, and sustainable social change.
• I’m also a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor, yes that is academic feminism for short.
• And I LOVE leadership, in academics, in theory, in action. I’m passionate about improving team dynamics, interpersonal relationships, and empowering people to reach full potential. Don’t worry, I will write a post on my personal leadership philosophy soon enough!
• I have played a number of roles in campus organizations including Membership Vice President of a co-ed service fraternity (Alpha Phi Omega), past director of the Alleviating Poverty Through Entrepreneurship Summit (APTE), past Leadership Facilitator for Emerging Leaders Institute (ELI), and 3-year employee of Residence Life.
• And this summer, I am so happy to be spending 10 weeks with Besa in their rustic yet beautiful office in Franklinton.

I was fortunate enough to be able to start my fellowship 2 weeks early because of a timeline overlap, so at the time of posting this, I have just completed my third week with Besa. I thought I would give you a recap of all the incredible work Besa does, including my excitement to be working here. I will be writing you a bonus Week 1 blog to make up for the lost time before we knew each other.

Besa Community

Besa is an Albanian term that represents the belief that when we work together, we can make an impact on our community.

Besa is not your typical nonprofit. Besa is one of the best functioning non-profit social enterprises I have ever been exposed to. We pride ourselves on our volunteer project organization for the community, volunteer project curation for corporations, and our corporate philanthropy + volunteer software, Promise. This leaves us as a 501(c)3 with the capacity to accept donations AND have a sustainable revenue model through corporate clients. We also have our own software, how many nonprofits fully function community advocacy and also run a tech start-up??

Our mission is simply to connect more people to their community through service. Besa is all about creating and facilitating partnerships between volunteerism, nonprofits, and corporate partners. We believe that the best way to maximize doing good for the greater good (that’s our tagline) is getting everyone involved. We partner with 70+ Columbus nonprofits, 30+ corporate partners, and have a volunteer base made up of thousands of community members. With these partners involved, we have completed over 1,000 volunteer projects. Partnering with so many community stakeholders gives us an incredible amount of stories and allows us to diversify our impact.

Why Besa?

I am so excited to be working with Besa for so many reasons. I love nonprofits, but I am efficiency driven and impact focused. Besa is an incredible place for me to learn about some of the biggest struggles corporations have with managing their CSR/philanthropy/community impact. Besa has a variety of tools and assets to help these struggles of course, but even more importantly, I get to hear from companies themselves about what it is they need.

Besa is in a pivotal growth period. Our team expanded from 2 employees to 8 in the past 12 months, we are working on strategy, building capacity, and are entering critical research stages to ensure growth is thoughtful and manageable for us.

Because we are a small team I have the opportunity to really get a feel for the full operations of the organization. I can dabble in projects relating to fundraising, corporate partnerships, HR, data management, event planning, and more. All of which playoff skills and experiences that I have built, but will teach me so much more.

The Future

I am so eager to build 7 more weeks of experience at Besa. I can already tell that there are projects I won’t want to leave behind when it is time. I’ve made it my mission to maximize my impact and productivity while I am here. I know I only have 10 weeks, so I need to ensure I am learning and contributing as much as possible.

The Past

If you’re interested in what I’ve done so far, stay tuned for my post on Friday!

Thanks for reading!